


Disenchantment Meta and Analysis

by tothineownelfbetrue



Category: Disenchantment (Cartoon 2018)
Genre: Analysis, Character Analysis, Gen, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Lemon batteries, Literary Analysis, Literary References & Allusions, Literary Theory, Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs, More tags to be added, Mythology References, Other, Zog's lemons, analysis posts, symbol analysis, the hell gate, when life hands you lemons... write meta about them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:54:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26943991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tothineownelfbetrue/pseuds/tothineownelfbetrue
Summary: Fandom meta and series analysis essays on various aspects of Disenchantment.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 10





	1. Bean - Character Motivation

**Author's Note:**

> So, I'm huge into meta and analysis for things and Disenchantment is a series well suited for analysis. This will mostly contain reposted or extended essays from my tumblr, sometimes with some changes in format or added material.
> 
> Subjects will range from character analysis, theories on upcoming storyline and seasons and literary analysis, as well as some general thoughts on symbolism, elements of mythology and folklore on the series, and other things as well.

So this one is in response to a question asked on the tumblr

Princess-Unipeg asked:

**_So what’s the deal with Bean? What kind of story arc are they going for with Bean? In the premiere episodes she’s running away from her arranged marriage but afterwards she’s just drinking and partying like she’s trying to forget she’s a princess._ **

\---

So, diving right in on the response:

I think one of the biggest factors for Bean, as we see a lot in Part 1, is her complete lack of knowing what she’s supposed to be doing with her life. She talks several times on the idea of seeking purpose, but that is actually something that develops gradually over the course of the first two parts.

Bean in episode 1 doesn’t really know who she is or what she wants out of her life. She does know several things she **doesn’t** want though. She doesn’t really want the marriage, either to Guysbert or Merkimer. Like a lot of people who are adrift in life, she fills up the sense of helplessness with things that she thinks she has control over - drinking, doing drugs, partying, having sex. All things that have the dual purpose of both distracting her from the particular emptiness and disconnect in her life while also giving her a brief high (in the case of the drugs and alcohol, it’s kind of a literal high as well). They also piss off her dad and the people who are telling her what things she can and can’t do, which is an added bonus.

The trouble is... none of it actually has any long term effect of making her feel better. It’s useless for the actual long-term purpose of making her satisfied in her life and herself. It’s just a bandaid on the problem.

And a big part of why she does it is precisely because she doesn’t even realize what the problem is, or what in her life is making her feel this way. 

There’s a lot of exploration I want to do into Bean’s character - and some time in the future I need to write up all the notes I’ve made about her literary tropes and the arcs she seems to be fitting into - but this particular issue is entirely about Bean’s unfulfilled needs.

So, I’m going to ignore Bean’s overall character arc in a literary sense and go into why I think Bean is actually a well-done character. I’ve seen some criticism of all three of the mains - especially Bean and Elfo - but for the moment I’m going to focus on Bean.

One criticism I saw that someone was leveling toward Bean was that she ‘seems inconsistent in her characterization. They talk about a similar matter to what you mentioned here, that she goes from not seeming to give a shit about anything in Part 1 to wanting to help her people and improve their situation in Part 2. And sure, if you consider these two points independently, it can sure seem like they just did a total 180 on Bean’s character.

Except if you look at all the steps she takes throughout the episodes, it’s a perfectly logical progression. 

Now, a large part of Bean’s problem (other than family issues, prophecies, that kind of thing) is centered in her current position on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

So this is a theory that people are motivated by these particular five categories of needs that can be arranged into a hierarchy (obvious title is obvious, right?). It states that until needs at a lower level on the hierarchy are met, individuals have trouble focusing or addressing higher needs. And once you’ve fulfilled a lower need, you’ll start to realize and desire things higher up on the chart that you’ve previously been unable to focus on because of more pressing needs.

The chart is here:

The first need, the most vital is **Physiological** , which is the need for basic things you need to even survive. Water, food, shelter, that kind of thing. Until you have these, you can’t really worry about stuff like Esteem or self-improvement.

The second is **Safety** needs, the need to be secure and safe. The lack of a feeling of security leads to anxiety and leads to fear responses.

This second section on the hierarchy of needs is actually basically where Bean starts out. She doesn’t lack for things like food or a roof over her head or money. There’s no real worries about job security or anything like that. The kingdom would literally have to be overthrown for her to be in the risk of too much loss of her lifestyle and general level of comfort.

However, she lacks #3 on the list: a sense of love and belonging and connection to others. She has never been able to develop strong bonds due to the distant nature of her family and the fact that her status means that most people do not - and indeed cannot - view themselves as equal to her. Every resident of Dreamland knows who she is and their treatment of her is always influenced to some degree by her status as a princess. This is a particular need that is not as easily filled in her normal life.

Enter Luci and Elfo. They are completely separate from Dreamland, total strangers, in a sense, and her position is not important to them. When she’s given the opportunity to be on equal footing and actually make friends, she does! This starts to fulfill her need for acceptance and friendship and belonging.

That means that over the course of part one, she’s starting to shift into a different realm of thinking entirely. She’s started to focus more on herself, trying to figure out who she is and what she wants. This is the process we’re seeing throughout part one and the beginning of part two. Note that she starts asking questions about both herself and about what ‘normal’ people would do.

In regards to the shift that the one person mentioned, looking at the timeline for Bean... in the first episode, though she occasionally interacts with people outside of the castle - mostly in the context of going to the bar, getting drunk, and gambling (and of course, trying to get laid) - she still has no actual idea what normal people DO (she specifically mentions this in “Faster Princess, Kill, Kill”).

Dealing with Luci and Elfo starts to give her a baseline to be more curious about other people in general, but it’s not until she’s banished from the castle and has to actually live out among the citizens of Dreamland that she realizes that people don’t just live in a state where food, shelter and other needs are met. They have to do something to earn them. She’s actually very enthusiastic about getting a job at this part, and I think a portion of that is because she’s been starting to feel that need for some purpose and her previous attempts to simply immerse herself in things that might have made her feel better before isn’t as helpful anymore. Just drinking and getting high isn’t enough.

Needless to say, being a princess with no knowledge of the world and how even basic things work... she completely fails at everything she does. It does, however, provide an opportunity to see that she’s starting to grow away from that complete ignorance and dismissal of other people because she’s learning compassion to go along with her friendship. She is hopeful about sparing Gwen and then happy when she eventually gets to.

This is also the first instance where she starts to express concern about whether Zog actually has any respect for her and her abilities when he says he’s proud of her. Notable that she has a brief moment of pushback against this earlier in the episode when she does the typical teenage behaviour of acting like she doesn’t care what he thinks, but I actually feel that she just didn’t realize she did care at that point.

The next episode brings this change to the forefront. She spent a lot of “Faster Princess, Kill, Kill” feeling terrible at this evidence that she can’t actually do things that everyone else can seemingly do, no matter how lowly. She confesses, while drunk, that she wants to feel like she has a purpose in life. It’s something she wasn’t even **aware** of until spending time in Dreamland trying to find a job and was able to make the connection of job = purpose. Now that she knows what she’s missing, she desperately wants to fulfill that need (Esteem).

This is a thread that continues to grow throughout the next few episodes though it’s a bit in the background during “Love’s Tender Rampage” and is present but not as important to her as preserving her need for “Love and Belonging” after one of her companions is kidnapped in “The Limits of Immortality” It’s only allowed to finally come to the forefront again after the insanity of the trip to Maru and then Hell and then the restoration of Dreamland are no longer adding immediate stresses to her.

Her growth through Part 2 focuses a lot on identity and purpose. Who defines Bean’s identity? Is it her mother? Is it her dad? Her identity on the whole has been thrown into a state of confusion from what she’s learned in Maru and she’s having to piece things together. It’s a precarious position because her strong base of friendship with Elfo has also taken a few hits, though that pillar has not yet crumbled. Similarly, Luci is undergoing his own crisis of identity which means he’s not as involved in the support of Bean as previously.

Still, Bean starts to choose to define herself on her own terms, an identity separate from the one her mother has for her. In that, she also starts to reach toward Need #5: Self-Actualization. She’s starting to want to be better for the sake of being a better person. It’s part of her exploration of identity, the realization that she can be Better and that she wants to strive for that. It’s why she tries to expand her horizons, why her drinking and several other behaviours scale back. It’s not representative of an abrupt change in Bean’s identity but one that makes sense with what she’s experienced and learned and how it’s affected her view of herself and the world.

And on top of that, she’s started to express compassion in a broader sense as well, toward all the residents of Dreamland. She’s also begun to extend it to Derek, whom she’s harbored a great deal of resentment toward for a long time.

It’s important to note that while Bean’s journey and growth is very personal and is self-motivated... it wouldn’t even be possible for her to have reached this point without the friendship and support that Luci and Elfo have provided her. They filled in a key gap in her life that she didn’t know she was missing and helped catapult her forward in her journey toward being the person she’s meant to be.

And at its core, the story of Disenchantment is not actually a fantasy-adventure-comedy romp with a fate of the world subplot about dark evil gods and magic. I mean... yes, it **is** also that, but Disenchantment is focused not on the plot or the comedy as much as it is the characters. It’s a character-driven story. Everything about it must then serve the real story... 

And that story - as admitted by Josh Weinstein in an interview - is about how these three young idiots are marching into adulthood without a roadmap or a single clue of what it all means. But they have each other. And I think on some level it touches on one of my favourite concepts, which is that people can be powerful agencies of change within each other. With care and support, people can make each other better. They can make the world better.

Honestly, it’s a message I feel is really needed right about now.


	2. Zog's Lemons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anon asks what's the deal with the Lemon Crusades?
> 
> or: when life hands you lemons... write meta.

Anon asked:

What do you think about Zog's prize lemon? A possible treasure from Maru? Is there anything significant or symbolic about citrus fruits?!

\--

Great question! I love lemons myself so of course I have a bias toward thinking they’re awesome and being happy to see them show up in things, so certainly I'm not going to complain that they're prized.

In this case, there’s actually a ton of mythology surrounding lemons that they could be drawing on, but before I get to that, I will point out that the first thing I noticed about the Lemon Crusades mentioned in Disenchantment is that Zog mentions that wars were fought and maps redrawn. Clearly something big went on during these crusades. It’s also another reason I’d love to more closely examine the various maps in the castle to see if any of them are prior to the redrawing of the maps caused by the Lemon Crusades.

So, first, a little bit of background about lemons. 

Lemons are a fruit native to South Asia. Though they're popular specifically for cooking, they've got a really long history as to how they got to be used in the manner they are. They were believed to have originated as a hybrid of citron fruit and bitter orange, but it's so far back that they're regarded as their own thing now. They were brought from Asia to Europe during Roman times and from there made the jump to Persia, Egypt and the Mediterranean regions. They were far more popular in Arabia than in Europe though and were often cultivated as an ornamental tree rather than for food. It wasn't until several centuries later - and by several, I mean like over 1000 years - that they were cultivated widely in Europe. 

They were still regarded as ornamental, but were also used as a medicinal fruit. They were often brought on ships past a certain point to help prevent scurvy, though at the time they didn't know that scurvy was the result of lack of vitamin C, they did figure out that lemons could be used to stave it off. Seeds were brought to the Americas early on during colonization and became widespread. One serving of lemon contains 64% of the needed amount of vitamin C. They're also much higher in citric acid than most other commonly used citrus (limes are the only ones close in citric acid content). This is relevant for something else I'll cover later.

Lemons were particularly popular in Greece where they had all kinds of associations with positive effects. They were used for their antibacterial properties (thanks in part to the high citric acid content which can indeed kill some bacteria) and were used to combat depression and anxiety. 

Theoprastus, known as the father of botany described lemons as "The Apples of Medea".

Myth-wise, I think it was a great choice for them to go with a lemon as Zog’s prize possession. Why? 

In Greek Mythology, the goddess Hera was given some trees as a gift when she married Zeus. One of them was known as the tree of the golden apples. In a later myth, Heracles would climb the wall and steal the fruit from this tree. But here’s what most modern retellings of the myth don’t say… the “tree of the golden apples” wasn’t an apple tree at all! It was a lemon tree! There were three nymphs guarding the three trees given to Hera. One of the trees was a Citron, one an Orange and the last, the tree of golden apples, was a lemon tree.

And the reason why the golden apples were so desired? Because they granted the person who ate them immortality. So it seems entirely possible that in the world of Disenchantment, that Zog heard of these miraculous fruits and mounted a crusade to retrieve them, only to find either that the Lemons did not grant immortality, or that they were useless for the actual purpose he wanted them for (restoring Dagmar). 

With that context, the fact that Zog would wage a useless war that cost the lives of many people and redrew kingdom lines doesn’t seem quite as farfetched as him simply wanting a delicious - if sour - fruit.

Though it's not relevant to the mythology that might have inspired Zog to begin a crusade in the first place, that lemons also have another property of note. The high acidity of them actually makes them usable as a battery, much like the potato batteries Bean helped make. The composition of lemons is very similar to that of the first electric battery which used brine instead of lemon juice. You put a zinc item into the lemon and the energy is generated from the zinc oxidizes, dissolving into the acid of the lemon and exchanging electrons with the acid. The excess electrons become the source of energy. Had they not eaten the lemon early on, Sky might have had Bean use that for the power source instead!

I'm curious if this will come back at some point, perhaps in the context of the lemon as a source of energy or power. They do reference the Lemon Crusades on more than one occasion, making me think it may be a plot point somewhere down the line.


	3. The Hell Gate - Symbols and Theories

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To celebrate the upcoming season premiere, I'm posting some of my theories prior to episodes dropping! This is just for fun because I really want to see if any of these are actually accurate

Okay, so I’m mostly just jotting something down before I get back to writing fic, but this is an older theory I have that I feel still has some potential to it.

I don’t remember if I posted it here, but there’s a door they go through when they’re trying to find Elfo in Hell. It’s giant and Bean opens it by holding Luci’s tail to the symbol on it.

If you look at the symbols, clockwise from the top there’s a star, a gear, a gemstone, a trident, an upward arrow, an anchor, a keyhole and a peppermint.

I had a theory posted earlier about how Dreamland wasn’t a kingdom by itself but was rather meant to be the main seat of an alliance between the magical realms of the world, something that seemed supported by the fact that Dreamland has this mixed imagery all over it, most notably in the stained glass windows in the chapel and the throne room.

So my initial thought is that the symbols represented the kingdoms that were formerly part of this alliance. A few seemed obvious: The gear being Steamland, the gem is Bentwood, the keyhole is Maru and the peppermint is the Elf Kingdom (note: not Elfwood. I believe that there was an elf kingdom before the elves went into hiding, as Rulo refers to them as refugees at one point).

Remembering that part of the writing team is from Gravity Falls, I also couldn’t help but see a similarity when it came to the idea of symbols and characters. With that in mind, I have to wonder if maybe the symbols also represent characters who will be important in the final conflict. 

Given the amount of door and key imagery, my guess is that there is a sealed dark entity (perhaps the brother to the One True God) and that the whole thing with Maru and the crown is actually an effort to give that god a physical form on earth, but that all the previous people who have tried have simply been driven mad (or worse). I think that there will be an overall plot about bringing together the broken apart/warring kingdoms of this world in an effort to finally destroy or seal away this dark entity for good.

With that as a premise, I feel like each of these symbols represents a person who will be instrumental to helping them to do so.

Just a few guesses on which characters might be represented:

Merkimer (for Bentwood), Sky Gunderson (Steamland), Kissy (Elfwood) - I doubt Elfwood would be represented by Elfo, I think he’ll be represented by something else, if anything.

Other potential candidates: Tess. She feels important but I’m not sure what her role is. I also think Derek is significant too, and the brief snapshot of him in the teaser images just makes me that much more intrigued.

I’m still not sure what the anchor, trident and star represent.

My initial thought for the star was Twinkletown, but the symbol we’ve seen for that is a six sided star. It’s possible the star could also represent Heaven/the heavens, as it’s directly counter to the arrow symbol that activates using Luci’s tail.

The anchor seems like it might possibly be related to the Land Vikings (who drive land ships which have anchors) but again, I’d need to do more digging for that. The trident could be Dreamland? It could also be a tower instead of a trident.

So... any thoughts?

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this meta. If you have questions or areas of the series you'd like to hear more thoughts on, be sure to leave me a comment here or send an ask on my tumbr: tothineownelfbetrue 
> 
> I'm always happy to answer questions or expand on subjects! If you have any theories of your own, also feel free to share them!


End file.
